The writer takes the stage and the murmur that reigns in the Juan Rulfo auditorium melts away. She has very black hair, short, straight, close to her head, parted in the middle. An earring in each of her ears: two long, narrow, golden sticks that beat rhythmically against her neck as she walks. A purple shirt with glitter lines that shine with the white lights of the aseptic room. There is applause and a shy gesture. María Ospina sits and looks to the sides as if she did not want to face the dozens of pairs of eyes that follow her movements. As they introduce her, she smiles uncomfortably. She clasps her hands, nods her head, loses her sight at an indefinite point: she almost seems to be praying, a gesture that does not completely clash with her at the award ceremony for an award named after a poet nun of the XVII century.
On his birthday, Ospina received a different congratulatory call. A voice on the other end of the phone announced that she had just won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz prize while the Colombian writer was walking along “an old street in the center of Madrid.” “A neighborhood that still preserves buildings from that strange, eventful, fascinating and very baroque end of the 17th century, which was precisely the time in which Sor Juana lived,” the author said this Wednesday at the International Book Fair (FIL). of Guadalajara, at the award ceremony.
At 47 years old, Ospina has become the second Colombian—the first was Laura Restrepo in 1997—to receive the award, one of the main literary recognitions for authors in the Spanish-speaking world, thanks to her first novel, Just a little here (Random House, 2023). The book, starring two dogs, a scarlet tanager, a beetle and a corpspin, “is an attempt to think away from a tradition that insists on the superiority of the human order and its rationality when the human is precisely a network of dependencies between species “, he said in his speech: “Question the anthropocentric fantasy that other living beings are irrelevant or inferior.”
On the day of the announcement, Ospina recalled, he was very close to the Royal Palace of Madrid, “which was built with the looting of America and where the conquest is still shamelessly praised and its violence is silenced.” Five minutes away there is a statue in honor of Sor Juana: “It is perhaps the only monument that exists in honor of her in Spain. I am moved that he is there, rigorously looking at the horizon, with pen and paper in hand, in the midst of so many statues of empire-building patriarchs, of so many women reduced to allegory or mythological figures, of so many men on horseback eager to command and occupy”.
“Not knowing what to do very well with the joy of the news, I made a pilgrimage a few blocks to the statue to thank him, as if urgently searching for a ritual and a body.” She was unable to climb the pedestal because of the height, but her 10-year-old son “climbed it with enthusiasm.” He left some flowers in Sor Juana’s hands. “An Irish couple looked at us perplexed, I heard them wondering about the statue and, since it is difficult for me to give up my teaching vocation, I got into their conversation without having been invited and told them about it,” added the writer.
“An acclaimed literary voice”
The award ceremony took place without surprises. Marisol Schulz, the director of the FIL, acted as master of ceremonies at a long table that also included the rector of the University of the Claustro de Sor Juana, Carmen López Portillo, and three members of the jury: the president of the committee, Sara Poot-Herrera, Diana Sofía Sánchez and Daniel Centeno Maldonado. Schulz has welcomed Ospina to the literary Olympus of which she has been a part since this Wednesday: that of a tradition of high-caliber writers such as Elena Garro, Cristina Rivera Garza, Margo Glantz, Gioconda Belli, Almudena Grandes, Camila Sosa Villadas or Daniela Tarazona , the previous winner.
Sticking to a protocol script, Schulz, with Ospina’s book in hand, has highlighted “this wonderful novel” as “a literary voice acclaimed from scattered parts of Latin America for its narrative proposal in which it opens a channel to the language and animal gaze of a poetic and critical form.” Perhaps to tone down the solemnity a couple of tones he added: “I must say that the edition is also beautiful.” And back to academicism: “In this book, María Ospina offers the reader a new perspective of the world that lies beneath other species that we do not understand as much as we think, other species that are not human, or that we simply decide to ignore. Thus, migratory birds, dogs, not only cohabit the planet with human beings, they suffer a shared destiny, victims of their own condition that prevents them from hating us.”
Ospina has taken the microphone to give an intense, poetic and passionate speech. The shyness that she appeared at the beginning has given way to a solid, confident tone, probably the professional deformation of a teacher at Wesleyan University (United States). Although the emotion, at times, made her voice tremble. She has remembered her origins, the forests and mountains in which she grew up, the “years of wandering along the rural paths and the shortcuts of many of those mountains.” She has been a vindication of nature, the foliage, the rain, the wind, the smells, the sounds, the movements of “a world inhabited by many spices” and the women who explore it. “This book is an attempt, although I know it is limited, imperfect and full of paradoxes, to lower the volume of human voices so that others can sound.”
“I want to begin by celebrating the 31 years of this award, supporting women who write and recognizing the desire, the duty, the urgency to tell, to investigate, to philosophize that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz embodied several centuries ago and that continues today being urgent to defend. An award that for three decades has defended literature as the place from which the most complex questions are woven and those who are convinced of the simplicity and obviousness of the world are challenged,” she said. And a long applause concluded her speech for her.
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